Ironstone was found at Skinningrove in 1847, and the Cleveland coast has not looked back since. By 1874 the Loftus Iron Company had two blast furnaces lit and roaring above the village, built on land leased from the Maynard estate. Boom turned to bust within three years. The company went under, sold at auction in 1880 for the bare minimum bid, and the Skinningrove Iron Company rose from the wreckage.
What followed was a proper rollercoaster. A steel plant arrived in 1907. Two more furnaces went up during the First World War, when Skinningrove was the only steel plant making high explosives, and Zeppelins came looking for it. The Depression brought a bold gamble instead of retreat: a total rebuild of the steel plant through the winter of 1933, with thousands out of work while it happened. Two ageing furnaces were replaced in 1936. The Luftwaffe landed a direct hit in 1942, and still the mills came back within six months.
The postwar furnace of 1950 was the works at its peak, turning out five thousand tons of steel a week. Steelmaking left for Redcar in 1974, ownership passed from British Steel to Corus to Tata to Jingye, and the furnaces themselves are long gone.
Their waste is not gone at all. What poured out as slag now sits above the sands looking every bit like ancient rock, weathered by a century of rain and wind into something the cliffs themselves might envy. Various seabirds have since made themselves quite at home on these man-made ledges, treating industrial leftovers as prime coastal property.
Source: Hart, Colin , Skinningrove ‘150 Not Out’.
Leave a Reply